AO3 coding

Every once in a while I resolve to post more. So far that hasn't really worked out well, as you might have noticed. Right now, I'm thinking it might be nice to write more about my coding for the AO3. So.

The past few weeks I've been working on rewriting the HTML parser from scratch and the code is now on our test archive so that testers can bang on it. I'm a bit wary about that. The problem with the parser is that it's not only about gradually enhancing it. There were cases that couldn't be handled by our current parser on principle, hence the rewrite, but it might very well turn out that there are cases which can't be handled by my approach either. And the whole inserting of linebreaks when users aren't using complete html or the fixing of common html errors is a bit of a vague target anyway since there are often several possible solutions, and you have to try for the most common or the least annoying one.

Regarding the upcoming translation interface for translating the AO3, I've now added the possibility to comment on translations. That took me longer than I had expected; I hadn't realised how involved our comments code actually is. Except for email notifications, everything seems to finally work. Next I have to think about who's going to get email notifications of top-level comments on translations. No-one? The person who created the translation? The person who last edited it? I'm going to have a look at how comments on tags are handled, and maybe ask translators if they have an opinion on that.

Dropping by (saw this on my network page) to thank you for working on the translation interface - I was very pleased to hear a few months back that you'd picked up that project and look forward to it becoming part of the live archive code.